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An anonymous reader writes: China is putting into place a new set of regulations for how banks interact with technology, and it has many companies worried. While the rules might enhance security for the Chinese government, they devastate it for everyone else. For example, not only will China require that companies turn over source code for any software sold to banks, the companies building the software (and hardware) must also build back doors into their systems. The bad news for us is that most companies can't afford to simply refuse the rules and write China off. Tech industry spending is estimated to reach $465 billion in 2015, and it's projected for a huge amount of growth.

KermodeBear writes "Dungeons and Dragons — originally Satan's Game — has now been found to encourage gang-like behavior. In a finding by a three judge panel of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, D&D 'can mimic the organization of gangs and lead to the actual development thereof.' From the ruling: 'during D&D games, one player is denoted the "Dungeon Master." 'The Dungeon Master is tasked with giving directions to other players, which Muraski testified mimics the organization of a gang.'"

Since the article is about US models of cars, the US numbers are appropriate. Since the article claims that this feature is already common in European diesels, I would guess that it is still a win in those cars as well.

tekgoblin writes "Wow, I would never have thought to try and cook food with the power that a standard USB port provides, but someone did. A standard port provides 5V of power, give or take a little. I am not even sure what it takes to heat a small hotplate, but I am sure it is more than 5V. It looks like the guy tied together around 30 USB cables powered by his PC to power this small hotplate. But believe it or not, it seems to have cooked the meat perfectly."

These conditions apparently don't show up enough to justify the cost of determining safe operating parameters. Therefore, no flying. It isn't really complicated -- if a bunch of airlines want to get together and pay for the testing, they can fly. Otherwise, they stay on the ground.

CyberDragon777 writes "Ubuntu's future 10.10 operating system is going to make a small, but contentious change to how file sizes are represented. Like most other operating systems using binary prefixes, Ubuntu currently represents 1 kB (kilobyte) as 1024 bytes (base-2). But starting with 10.10, a switch to SI prefixes (base-10) will denote 1 kB as 1000 bytes, 1 MB as 1000 kB, 1 GB as 1000 MB, and so on."

ElectricSteve writes "Shooting in 3D has traditionally required a complex, bulky and fragile rig using two cameras and additional hardware to calibrate and adjust them. Panasonic's straight-forwardly-named Twin-lens Full HD 3D camcorder looks to radically change the 3D game, with integrated lenses and dual SDHC memory card slots allowing you to capture 3D footage immediately, with just one device." So there ya go, get started making your own Avatar.

I think that if the average person walking around had a 10% chance to be carrying a camera that could do thermal imaging, it would be hard to argue that you had a reasonable expectation of privacy and the police would probably be allowed to use it without a warrant.

If LIDAR cost 100k, I think the law enforcement would still be entitled to use it, but if FLIR cost $100 that would make a difference.

IR cameras and film detect NIR in the 800nm - 1.3 micron range. Your stove heating element that is glowing a dim red will light up brightly in such a device, but it is completely useless for this type of application. IR thermometers and thermal imaging systems for the 0-100F range use much longer wavelengths, around 10 microns.

Note that you can't even make IR film that is any good at thermal wavelengths because it would get exposed sitting in a box. The film would have to be prepared, stored, used, and developed in a cryogenic environment. This may have been done (perhaps for IR astronomy), but you obviously can't just buy a roll of 35mm "thermal" film and pop it in a nikon.

An anonymous reader writes "Some hackers out there don't like to do all the hard work of running a successful phishing campaign. Instead, they developed a simple online service to 'steal' account details from the hard-working phishers. Named AutoWhaler, the service allows anyone to scan a phishing server for log files that contain juicy information such as usernames and passwords."

Openfiler's web gui is buggy as hell, its local LDAP server option is poorly documented and provides terrible diagnostic messages when improperly configured, and it has no official support for installing/booting from flash. Never trust a product that wants to charge money for the admin guide.

I only tried FreeNAS briefly, and did end up using openfiler, but I would love to see anything beat openfiler.

GCD is a mechanism to let one central authority dispatch threads across multiple cores, for all running applications (including the OS).

This is what most people talk about, and what is most obvious from the name, but it is not the interesting part of GCD.

The interesting part of GCD is blocks and tasks, and it is useful to the extent which it makes expressing parallelism more convenient to the programmer.

The "central management of OS threads" is marketing speak for a N-M scheduler with an OS wide limit on the number of heavyweight threads. This is only useful because OS X has horrendous per-thread overhead. On Linux, for instance, the correct answer is usually to create as many threads as you have parallel tasks and let the OS scheduler sort it out. Other operating systems (Solaris, Windows) have caught up to Linux on this front, but apparently not OS X. If you can get the overhead of OS threads down to an acceptable level, it is always better to avoid multiple layers of scheduling.

So we've had a defined standard that was, arguably, not the easiest to understand. THEN harddrive manufacturers started their fraud. And THEN people started complaining. So what, and please think about this, would be the right decision here?

This is revisionist at best and really just wrong. Despite all "wisdom" to the contrary, there has never been a universal acceptance of 1 MB = 2^20 bytes on computers. For instance, all of IBMs mainframe hard drives from the 60s and 70s were sold using base-10 prefixes. Early desktop hard drives from the 80s used both. I think the ST506 used base-2, but some other models used base-10. All networking and communications standards (ethernet, modems, PCI, SATA...) use base 10 prefixes for MB/s and Mbit/s. 3.5" floppy disks used NASA-style units where 1 MB = 10^3*2^10. Even while RAM is still almost always measured in base-2 units (due to manufacturing issues making it much easier to produce in power-of-2 sizes -- something which is not true for hard drives) the speed of the memory bus on your CPU is still measured in base-10 units.

It is a *good* idea to have K and M mean the same thing everywhere. A system where a 1 GB/s link transfers 0.93 GB every second is stupid. This is especially important as computers are being used in more and more environments. Should a 1 megapixel camera mean 2^20 pixels? What about CDs with a 44.1 KHz sampling rate?